How?
In the UK, there's no right to bear arms, so people are pretty helpless against their oppressing government.
In the UK, there's no right to bear arms, so people are pretty helpless against their oppressing government.
There's a right to bear arms in the US and it doesn't seem to be helping them with their oppressive government.
Their biggest success as far as I know is starting free school lunches in the US, but that wasn't at gunpoint.
They're now getting investigated by the DOJ and their stock tanked
If they ever come to my door I'll either go postal or leave the country.
Its so bad here now.
When people want to revolt it doesn’t seem like the right to bear arms has much to do with it. Not having the right to bear arms certainly hasn’t stopped countless rebellions and revolutions across the world. It’s not like the French of the Russians had a right to bear arms before their successful revolutions.
Even in the UK, the lack of a right to bear arms didn’t stop Cromwell using firearms to defeat Charles II at the Battle of Worcester.
They're doing the worst cover up ever given grooming gangs and where they operate have been headlines in the UK for decades.
What they're not very good at is keeping the UK citizens at large well informed with a realistic sense of proportion given the scale of child sexual abuse far exceeds the activities of grooming gangs.
I'm glad you observe the distinction though.
Yes, in a direct confrontation and an all out war, the populace stands no chance against the US military (assuming the military will unwaveringly side against the populace), no argument there.
But an all out war is not an option, the government wouldn’t be trying to pulverize an entire nation and leave a rubble in place. If you completely destroy your populace and your cities in an all-out direct war, you got no country and people left to govern. It is all about subjugation and populace control. You can’t achieve this with air strikes that level whole towns.
Similarly, if the US wanted to “win” in Afganistan by just glassing the whole region and capturing it, that would be rather quick and easy (from a technical perspective, not from the perspective of political consequences that would follow). Turns out, populace control and compliance are way more tricky to achieve than just capturing land. And while having overwhelming firepower and technological advantage helps with that, it isn’t enough.
Help me out - how can policing possibly work if no one is legally required to be policed? You just end up with murderers, rapists etc. expressing their right to "resist" with arms like in spaghetti westerns. It is totally symbolic, and would crumble at the first instance of serious government interest of arresting 'troublemakers', which would of course start with a well crafted PR campaign to get the rest of the public on their side. I think it's naive.
Imagine a dark future with a sudden military coup by a small faction of extreme radicals that 85% of the population opposes. could enough citizens rise up and stop them? Could the calculus of being that coup leader be changed by the likelihood that they will be assassinated in short order, by one of millions of potential assassins? Quite possibly. These are not everyday concerns, of course, but the concerns of dark and dangerous times. It’s a bit like buying life insurance: hopefully I never need it.
I am not an expert, but taliban+al qaeda forces from the Afghanistan war era (that ended in 2021) should be able to provide a solid answer to your question. All I know is that they definitely didn’t make the US give up due to their military tech/firepower advantage, that’s for sure.
American police will shoot people dead in the streets with impunity, the military industrial complex engages in constant wars regardless of popular sentiment and the American government is currently being carved up by neo-nazis and oligarchs but you can legally be racist on the internet. I guess it truly is the land of the free.
Also... wait six months.
Just ask Russia and Ukraine.
Look around, human beings are quite clever.